Japanese Atomic Plume Doesn’t Pose Health Threat to U.S. Coast

By Brian K. Sullivan, Bradley Olson and Mark Chediak -
Mar 18, 2011

Radiation wafting toward the U.S.
from stricken nuclear reactors in Japan presents less of a
danger than 1950s-era atomic weapons testing or the 1986
Chernobyl accident, weather experts and government officials
said yesterday.

The radiation plume from the reactors is moving northeast
over the Pacific, the Austrian Meteorological and Geophysics
Center reported on its website. Weather patterns over the ocean
may bring it to the U.S. today, Jeff Masters, co-founder of
Weather Underground Inc. in Ann Arbor, Michigan, said in a
telephone interview.

Even in the worst-case scenario of a reactor meltdown at
the Fukushima plant, dilution of the radiation by the Jet Stream
and Pacific winds is likely to prevent harmful radiation from
reaching the West Coast, said Thomas McKone, an adjunct
professor in the Department of Environmental Health Sciences at
the University of California, Berkeley.

“There is enormous dilution between Japan and here,” said
McCone, who is also a senior staff scientist at the U.S. Energy
Department’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. “I don’t
think there can be any measurable health impacts in
California.”

After Chernobyl, experts found no measurable health effects
to humans from direct radiation exposure outside of a 50-mile
radius, according to McKone. Bombs tested in the U.S. in the
1950s and 1960s released much more radiation than is coming from
the Fukushima plant, crippled by Japan’s largest earthquake on
record and the resulting tsunami, Masters said.

Comparing Fallout

“It is hard to compare a bomb going off up in the air over Nevada with something 5,000 miles away in Japan at the
surface,” Masters said. “The exposure was far, far greater
from the Nevada test explosions.”

More than 500 atmospheric nuclear weapons tests were
conducted worldwide prior to 1963, according to the U.S. Centers
for Disease Control. The U.S. government, in a study that
included the CDC and the National Cancer Institute, estimated in
2006 that anyone living in the lower 48 states after 1951 had
been exposed to some fallout.

About 50 deaths have been directly attributed to radiation
from Chernobyl, while 4,000 may eventually die from the side
effects of exposure, mostly from cancer or related disease,
according to a 2005 World Health Organization report.

President Barack Obama said the U.S. faces no danger of
radioactive contamination from the crippled Japanese nuclear
plant and he has ordered a “comprehensive review” of safety
at U.S. facilities.

Particles in Plume

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has studied U.S. plants
and they have been “declared safe for any number of extreme
contingencies,” Obama said at the White House. Still, he said,
a review should be conducted based on what is learned from the
damage at the Japanese facility.

Radiation particles released into the air from the Japanese
reactor vessels and spent-fuel ponds are moving southeast before
extending in a northeasterly pattern over the Pacific. Particles
may start moving northwest as the winds are expected to shift.

Radioactive barium, cesium, iodine and tellurium have been
detected in the plume, the Austrian agency said yesterday. A
partially dispersed cloud passed through the Tokyo area on March
16, according to the Austrian center.

“Whether it will be even detectable” when it arrives in
the U.S. “is a question in my mind because of the amount of
dispersion that goes on over at least a 5,000-mile track that
that stuff had to take,” said Masters. “It just wasn’t emitted
in large enough quantities to be a threat to human health and it
may not even be detectable.”

No Health Issues

California Governor Jerry Brown said the state is
monitoring the situation. His spokeswoman, Elizabeth Ashford,
said that “at this point, there is no risk to California from
radiation.”

No radiation had been detected yesterday along the U.S.
West Coast and it is not known if or when it might reach
California, Howard Backer, interim director of the California
Department of Public Health, said yesterday during a call with
reporters.

“We don’t anticipate any amount of radiation that will
cause health effects,” Backer said. The plume from Japan will
be dispersed to the point where it may be difficult to
distinguish from normal background radiation sources, he said.

Radiation levels in the state may rise although not to a
degree that would pose a threat to public health, Jonathan Fielding, director of public health of Los Angeles County, said
during the press event.

Moving East

That hasn’t stopped fear from spreading, said Kirk Smith, a
professor at the University of California School of Public
Health at Berkeley who has studied the fallout from Chernobyl
and the health risks of radiation.

Smith said some of his students have discussed moving to
Denver to get away from fallout, unaware that exposure to
naturally occurring daily radiation is higher in mountainous Colorado than at sea level in California.

“The radiation you get on a flight to Denver would be far
higher than anything that could come from Japan,” Smith said.

San Francisco residents have rushed to stores to buy
potassium iodide pills, which can protect against radiation
exposure, said Eileen Shields, a spokeswoman for the city Public
Health Department.

“People are wasting their money and there is no reason to
do it because there is no radiation level sufficient to merit
this,” Shields said. The Johns Hopkins Office of Critical Event
Preparedness and Response warned that the drug may have serious
side effects for people with certain allergies and kidney and
thyroid problems.

More Monitors

The state of California and Los Angeles County may put up
additional radiation monitors to assess the situation, said
Chris Ipsen, division chief for the city of Los Angeles’s
emergency management department.

The best chance to detect the radiation in California may
come next week when the plume mixes with storm systems coming
ashore along the coast, said Masters, who before founding
Weather Underground tracked acid rain and air pollution.

“That would be the most likely time for it to get to the
ground and be detectable,” Masters said. “But again, the
amounts are going to be pretty darn small.”

The mapping requires computer models, and variables include
the height of the release as well as the weather patterns it
encounters.

Complicated Patterns

Weather over the Pacific can be complicated, said Jim
Andrews, a senior forecaster for AccuWeather Inc. in State
College, Pennsylvania.

The Jet Stream is always dipping and buckling, so anything
being carried on the wind could be blown over a wide area. In
addition, winds at different levels of the atmosphere blow in
different directions, which may shear apart a cloud of
radiation, he said.

“Certainly the weather is going to play a large factor,
otherwise the size of the particle will dictate how long it is
going to take to settle” to the surface, said David Stauffer, a
meteorology professor at Penn State. “The larger ones will fall
out quicker than the smaller ones.”

While plumes of radiation linked to the Chernobyl explosion
were detected all over the world, the amount at places such as Hawaii was less than the radiation exposure from a chest X-ray,
Smith said.

“Radiation is odd, and it has this terrible history of
being born in secrecy and war,” Smith said. “We are capable of
measuring extremely small amounts, but just because you can
measure it doesn’t mean it’s dangerous.”